Posada: A Double Standard in the War on Terror

On October 6, 1976 seventy-three people were killed when terrorists blew up Cubana Flight 455, which was on its way from Barbados to Cuba. Thirty years later, on September 11, 2006, Luis Posada Carriles, one of the men who allegedly carried out the attack, was sitting in a Texas prison when a federal judge in El Paso, Texas, ordered him released from detention. If a U.S. district court upholds the ruling, Posada could be on the street within a few weeks.

Why would the U.S. government set free a notorious terrorism suspect when it was simultaneously turning the American legal system upside down to permit the indefinite detainment and torture of suspected terrorists? Terrorism, it seems, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Posada, you see, is an old Cold Warrior. He received CIA training for the 1961 U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to oust Fidel Castro and is known to have carried out a number of U.S. government operations in Latin America. Posada was arrested after the Cubana Flight 455 bombing and tried by a Venezuelan military court, which acquitted him. In 1985, he escaped from jail while awaiting a civil trial. (Posada denies any involvement in the bombing, but FBI reports place him at several meetings in Caracas where the plan was hatched.)

Out of prison, operating under the name Ramon Medina, Posada ran arms to U.S.-backed Contras for Lt. Col. Oliver North; he has served as a spy for the Salvadoran president and military junta leader Napoleon Duarte; and he admitted to a New York Times reporter in 1998 that he organized a string of bombings of hotels and restaurants in Cuba during the 1990s.

Last year, Posada illegally entered the United States and settled in Miami, where he received a warm welcome from the anti-Castro community. It wasn't long, however, before he was taken into custody by immigration agents. Immigration Judge William Abbott ordered Posada deported but agreed not to send him to Venezuela or Cuba, after somewhat ironically concluding that he might be tortured there.

The governments of Cuba and Venezuela have both called on the Bush Administration to turn Posada over and thereby prove that there are no double standards in the war on terrorism. Posada, in turn, applied to become a U.S. citizen but subsequently withdrew his citizenship application, according to his attorney, to avoid embarrassing the U.S. government.

Judge Abbott, in considering whether to order Posada expelled from the U.S., listed off Posada's nefarious career highlights and weighed whether the U.S.–backed Bay of Pigs operation met the definition of terrorism. “It doesn't necessarily matter who helped it,” Abbott told the Miami Herald. “The question is whether that kind of activity today would be defined as aiding terrorism or participating in acts of terrorism.”

In early September, Posada challenged his detention in federal court, claiming that there was little likeliness a third country would accept him “in the foreseeable future.” He seems to be right about that—his old friends have apparently turned their backs on him, and according to the court order to release him, high-level contacts in Panama that he might have called upon for help are themselves under investigation. El Salvador rejected his request to enter the country, as did Honduras, where President Ricardo Maduro personally denounced Posada.

In issuing his September 11 order to release Posada, U.S. Judge Norbert Garney wrote that Posada must be freed unless the U.S. Attorney General certified that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Posada has engaged in certain terrorist activities or that he presents a threat to national security. Alberto Gonzales has done nothing.